Close encounter with Facebook Beacon — I put a lot of trust in sites like Facebook to do the right thing when it comes to privacy. After all, the only stuff that gets out into the public is the stuff that I actually put in. — Until now. — Earlier this week, I bought a coffee table on Overstock.com.

Is Facebook Really Ruining Christmas? — Political action and consumer advocacy organization MoveOn this week launched a public campaign against Facebook's new Project Beacon advertising system (our coverage). MoveOn characterizes the ad system as "a huge invasion of privacy" …

JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP: — When you buy a book or movie online—or make a political contribution—do you want that information automatically shared with the world on Facebook? — Most people would call that a huge invasion of privacy. But this week, Facebook began doing just that.

Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours — Amazon isn't disclosing how many Kindles it actually had ready to go, but apparently the idea of a tiny e-book reader with free EV-DO and the visual flair of an Apple IIc hit home for quite a few people, because they sold out in just five and a half hours.

An E-Book Reader That Just May Catch On — You've got to have a lot of nerve to introduce an electronic book reader in 2007. — Sure, the idea has appeal: an e-reader lets you carry hundreds of books, search or jump to any spot in the text and bump up the type size when your eyes get tired.

Can Amazon's Kindle e-book wean us off paper? — Amazon hopes its ebook reader will do for books what the iPod did for music. Danny Bradbury assesses this novel new device — Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, shows off the new Kindle ebook reader in New York

Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate — Facebook and Google have been competing with each over more than just social networking. Facebook is growing from 300ish employees today to 700 next year. And the best place to get good engineers and others is Google …

Rumour: News Corp to buy LinkedIn — [Welcome to TechCrunch UK and Ireland, subscribe to our RSS feed or see the right sidebar for the email newsletter. Digg this story. Got a story or news tip-off? Get in touch] — An unconfirmed rumour has reached me via a reliable source that LinkedIn …

Google Replaces Video Link with Products Link — Google on their global homepage replaced the top-left link to Google Video with a link to Google Product Search, the former Froogle. These navigational links are not consistent throughout Google's services, so the change isn't visible everywhere.

YouTube, MySpace and California's D.M.V. — As YouTube videos go, Kyle's driving test has nothing on Gizmo, the toilet-flushing cat. — But the California Department of Motor Vehicles remains convinced that its 55 videos running on the Web site will make roads a better place to travel …

One year later: Did Vista's focus on security pay off? — Consumers don't seem to care so much — Microsoft's emphasis on improvements to security features in Windows Vista may have undermined business adoption of the OS, as many business and enterprise customers are still holding off …

Apple on track to sell 25 million iPods this quarter — After analyzing October sales data from market research firm NPD, investment bank Piper Jaffray said Wednesday it expects Apple will sell a record 25 million iPods during the three-month period ending December.

PickyPirate: Metacritic Meets BitTorrent — This is exactly the gap PickyPirate is trying to fill. PickyPirate fetches the most popular movies, games and music albums from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, two well known review aggregators, and lists them on the frontpage.